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Eventually Rasputin made the acquaintance of Madame Virubova, the favorite lady-in-waiting of the czarina. With the credulity of a superstitious woman of her class, the czarina was a patroness of many occult cults and had a firm belief in the influence of invisible spirits. Rasputin was presented to her by the lady-in-waiting as an occult healer and a person of great mystic powers.
I told him this, whereat he growled: "Ah! the woman is coming to her senses. Yes. If she comes I will see her. She is pretty, Féodor pretty yes, very pretty." I drew a long breath. The unfortunate woman knew, no doubt, the serious charge against her husband, but never dreamed that Rasputin was the cause of that false accusation.
In the discussion which ensued I gathered that Rasputin and Azef had resolved, with the connivance and at the instigation of the German Foreign Office, to assassinate a certain well-known British member of Parliament who had been in Russia and had learned, through the British secret agent Mac, the betrayal of Russia into the hands of the Wilhelmstrasse.
In accordance with the plan formed by Boris Stürmer I next day accompanied the Starets by rail direct to Nijni Novgorod, by way of Moscow, thence taking steamer down the great Volga, a twelve-hour journey, to that city where they make bells and ikons, Kazan. Rasputin had put on his oldest and most ragged monk's habit, and carried a staff.
On the following day a middle-aged, fair-haired, rather well-dressed man, who gave the name of Nicholas Chevitch, from Okhta, a suburb of Petrograd, was brought to me by the monk who acted as janitor, and explained that he had private business with Rasputin. I left him and, ascending to the monk's room, found him extremely anxious to meet his visitor. "I will see him at once, Féodor.
Rasputin at last returned, forced to do so by the determined attitude of the Empress, who without doubt was suffering from serious religious mania, as well as an acute form of neurotic heart disease. The monk arrived quite unexpectedly at the Poltavskaya, and rang me up on the telephone late one evening. The Bishop Theophanus was, I found, with him.
"Let him take warning lest Gregory Rasputin lift his hand against him. Return home, and tell him that from me." That was all the advice he would give her. He was full of anger that the woman who had taken the picture should have been so negligent as to allow a copy to fall into the hands of others.
The opposite note of liberty was at Moscow where the children not infrequently, even under Tsardom, went on strike against their teachers, where servants tell masters what they ought to do, where a Rasputin is asked advice on imperial policy, the land of the Slavs where obedience is at its lowest ebb, and all the parks and gardens and country-sides languish naturally in disorder.
The murder of the court favorite, the infamous monk Rasputin, only intensified the reaction, though its story and sequel showed significantly how far many members of the Imperial family were from supporting the reigning head and his consort in the policy which was jeopardizing the dynasty. But the Czar's political blindness was incurable.
In the course of the winter of 1916-17, the monk, Rasputin, as a result of a plot, was invited to the home of a grand duke, a cousin of the Czar. There a young prince, determined to free Russia of this pest, shot him to death and his body was thrown upon the ice of the frozen Neva.
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